A boy stands in the rain: It drips like threads from blue, grey, algae-colored clouds.

He almost disappears into his sweater and pants.

He is holding an umbrella in his hands, he has not opened it.

His facial expression: open, looking inward.

A feeling, an amazement.

Fridtjof Küchemann

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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An old man stands in the snow: the flakes fall to the ground around him in dots and squiggles.

The brown pullover with a hint of a waistcoat over it, the plaid pants with shoes that are far too small peeking out make him appear almost misshapen.

A snowflake lands on the index finger of his right hand, he has already brought one to his mouth with the left one.

A taste, a memory.

On fifteen double pages, the Italian-French artist Beatrice Alemagna presents us with moments like these in her new picture book "The Little Big Moment": A reader looks up from her book in a meadow and sees a few petals in the wind.

A young man stretches out on a bed by the window and looks at the ceiling with a tear in the corner of his eye.

The silhouette of a girl is chasing around the city with a butterfly net on the river bank.

An infant sleeps in a woman's arms.

Even when Beatrice Alemagna shows a girl jumping rope or a whole group of children skating on the ice, her pictures radiate an astonishing calm.

This may be due to the use of colored paper, which Alemagna collaged and painted for her illustrations, making the images reminiscent of Wolf Erlbruch without connecting to his dynamic and playfulness.

But it is much more due to the serenity on the faces of her characters, to their stillness, their being with themselves, their resting within themselves.

But “The Little Big Moment” is about a feeling that some others would have portrayed with enthusiasm, with a radiance, with a far greater expressivity: Beatrice Alemagna tells, as she reveals herself on the last double page of her book, about happiness .

"Some people find it in a smell, in a look, in the arms of others," it says next to the picture of the sleeping baby, and whether it's the woman in the embroidered blouse, maybe an aunt or the baby itself, for its happiness it goes here, leave it open.

The man in the snow remembers his childhood, the boy in the rain is all feeling: the happiness that Beatrice Alemagna tells about cannot be bought, cannot be given, cannot be held on to.

It is fleeting and all we can do is practice our receptivity to recognize when it was there.

The book may seem like a riddle, but once read and solved, it has the opposite effect: you immediately want to leaf through it again and look at the characters, delighted in their happiness.

Beatrice Alemagna: "The little big moment"

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Translated from the French by Anna Taube.

Bohem Press, Münster 2022. 40 pages, hardcover, €18.

From 5 years